New Covenant, Thanksgiving 2023
Luke 17
11 On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten men with skin diseases approached him. Keeping their distance from him, 13 they raised their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, show us mercy!”
14 When Jesus saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” As they left, they were cleansed. 15 One of them, when he saw that he had been healed, returned and praised God with a loud voice. 16 He fell on his face at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. He was a Samaritan. 17 Jesus replied, “Weren’t ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 No one returned to praise God except this foreigner?” 19 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up and go. Your faith has healed you.”
I think we all know the magic word.
So, who decided that ‘please’ is the magic word? How magic can it be if kids are continually needing to be prompted to use it? And is it magic simply because it allows things to happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen unless the magic word is employed? That just sounds like quid pro quo: I’ll give you the magic word and you give me what I want. No magic there, kids.
And what about the coda to this little exchange, the well-worn phrase 'what do you say...?' Clearly, being a kid should come with some sort of handbook, or at least a set of cue cards, because the first time I say ‘what do you say?’ the kid just might not know what to say.
It might be fun to mess with the kids some time and add a new one, something like: ‘You know what to do next...‘ Poor kid. ‘What, wash my hands, get the mail, walk the dog, do my homework, get a job?‘ I suppose there would need to be some sort of “parental convention of agreed upon and largely vague questions” before you can add another.
There is another one, and it’s always the saddest moment of the day, because inevitably some parent is going to say ‘you know what time it is.’ And of course, there is only one answer to that question: bedtime. I used to tell my son that someday he would look forward to bedtime, like me, and it won’t seem like cruel and unusual punishment. At 32, Isaac seems to be finally catching on.
For today, it’s the second question that becomes our focus, the nature and tradition of saying thanks. It’s the theme of our reading and it’s also the theme of the day, with your unconscious mind already drifting to Thanksgiving preparation. When will I begin to thaw the bird? How many sides is too many? And do we really need soup? Soup in Florida? Seriously?
Being from away, I often get asked about Thanksgiving. Do you have Thanksgiving in Canada? Do you eat turkey or Canada goose? (okay, I made that up). Or how did it come about? Good question! Some in Canada will try to convince you our Thanksgiving has strictly Canadian roots. ‘Look to Samuel de Champlain,’ they will say, ‘and his Order of Good Cheer founded in the woods in 1606.’ Well, don’t be fooled. I think we’re mature enough to admit that our ancestors who walked away from a momentary bout of republican madness on this side of the border simply crossed the Niagara River one day and brought Thanksgiving with them. Canadian turkeys are still mad.
But if we look further back, before colonies and pilgrims, we see a rich tradition of giving thanks. The Romans did it four times a year, with the autumn festival specifically geared to the grape harvest, and everything good that comes from that. Then these festivals were ‘baptized’ (or stolen) by the early church, and by the time St. Augustine arrived in Canterbury (597) a fully-formed tradition of ‘Ember Days’ was ready for sharing.
Ironically, the name ‘Ymber’ seems to have Anglo-Saxon roots, and may predate both Augustine and his Christianity. Either way, by the Middle Ages the good people of England were alternating between fasting and eating ember pies and being grateful for the harvest. It even came with it’s own little rhyme:
Fasting days and Emberings be
Lent, Whitsun, Holyrood, and Lucie.
Okay, so it wasn’t every kid's favourite nursery rhyme, but I’m sure they loved the pies, which look suspiciously like quiche, which is fine by me.
And since we’ve crossed the pond for a moment, we should visit Oxford, or more specifically the Oxford dictionary, and investigate the difference between thankful and grateful. And you’ll be pleased to know that there is a difference, something that doesn’t seem to be the case on this side of the pond.
So thankful, according to Oxford, means “pleased and relieved,” giving the example “they were thankful that the war was finally over.” Odd. And the second example, “I was very thankful to be alive,” seems to have been written by the same person who wrote the first. It doesn’t exactly say turkey and pumpkin pie, does it? So on to grateful.
Grateful, for Oxford, means “feeling or showing an appreciation for something done or received.” And then gives the rather obvious example: “I'm grateful to you for all your help.” This seems much closer to the mark, which makes me think everything we’re doing has been mislabeled. But before you toss out your Happy Thanksgiving napkins and party hats, maybe we should dig a little deeper—and for this we need scripture.
Of course, I would be in trouble with a certain Old Testament scholar at my house if I don’t tell you that the earliest Thanksgiving tradition can be found in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, a bunch of Psalms, 2 Samuel 22, 1 & 2 Chronicles, and so on. The Hebrew Bible is filled with words and rituals that surround the need to give God thanks.
Moving from the Hebrew to the Greek, we also move from the macro concern of giving thanks for all that God has done for the people of Israel, to the micro concern of those who give thanks after meeting Jesus. Our story is just such a moment, a moment repeated throughout the Gospels, but told no more simply than in Luke 17.
Ten lepers cry out for help: “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” And without a thought, ten lepers were healed. ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests—the only ones who can declare you clean—and they will discover that you are clean.’ So, off they go, but one turns back, praising God, throwing himself at Jesus’ feet, and being thankful. At this moment Luke adds a ‘by the way’ to the story, saying ‘and by the way, he was a Samaritan.’ More on that in a minute. Jesus then transforms this healing into a teachable moment, saying ‘didn’t I just heal ten of you? Where are the others? Has no one else returned to praise God except this foreigner? Rise and go; your faith has made you well.’
So two things to consider here, the first is the tenth leper and the nature of his response, and the second is the obvious plot twist when we learn that this man is a Samaritan. Now, not wanting to wear you out with the dictionary, but I should point out that the nine who kept walking were likely “pleased and relieved,” meaning thankful, but it didn’t translate into any kind of tangible response. The tenth leper, “showing an appreciation for something done,” was grateful, and therefore returned to praise God and throw himself at Jesus’ feet. Now you can throw out the napkins.
And what about the plot twist? Does it matter that this man is a Samaritan? And why do Samaritans keep appearing anyway? So we’ll start there. In the literary world we find the idea of the ‘stock character,’ a person or group of people that frequently appear in a story to play a specific role—most often to embody a characteristic or trait. So Samaritans play the role of ‘the last person you would expect to do something’—like help someone beaten by robbers, or return to Jesus to express thanks. We don’t have time to do a full survey of the bad blood between Jews and Samaritans, so I’ll give you some shorthand instead. Jews viewed Samaritans the way evangelicals view Mormons, or the way Anglicans view Methodists. Or how Publix views Aldi.
For Luke, then, the Samaritan is playing a role. And like the Good Samaritan helping out when the so-called religious ones refuse to do so, the Samaritan leper turns around when the nine locals don’t. In other words, when the stock character—whoever that may be—understands the need to help or provides a grateful response, then we’re really going to be disappointed in everyone else. In other, other words, shame on the people who can’t respond as well as the outcast/foreigner/outsider/etcetera.
Now that the religious people have received their ‘direct message’ found in the lesson, what about those nine others? What are we to make of them? First thing to note is that they are still healed. Still released from a terrible ailment, still able to show the priest and be declared clean, still able to return to kin and clan, still able to rejoin the life they knew. With Jesus there are no take-backs, no retractions, no post-healing reassessment. They remain healed. A tad rude perhaps, but still healed.
Still, you might imagine that the ratio would be a little better. Seriously, only one turned back? I can see one ingrate in ten, or two at the most, or three on a really cloudy day, but nine out of ten? In a kind of weird echo of the parable of the lost sheep—the one where the shepherd leaves ninety-nine to fend for themselves for the sake of the one that was lost—here Jesus has lost nine-of-ten but receives thanks from one.
So maybe this is a coded message, a kind of antiquarian survey of thankfulness, that says ‘here, this is typical of my day, what’s it like in yours?’ Well, how are we on the thankfulness scale? Do we rate better than a one-out-of-ten?
I’m not sure we do. We’re quick to tell the wee ones to say thanks, but how are we doing? I might argue that both as individuals and as a society we’re pretty self-satisfied, perhaps a little too convinced that we did all this on our own, that we are somehow the authors of our own good fortune, and not the grateful children of the living God.
In fact, I meet lots of people who will credit their hard work, their cleverness, their ability to carry on while others failed, and neglect to mention the Maker of All. Now maybe they’re just not in church, so God isn’t top-of-mind, but even here we tend to imagine that we’re the faithful ones, when in fact it’s God that’s faithful to us.
Still, with Jesus there are no take-backs, no retractions, no post-healing reassessment. God blesses us and we remain blessed whether we’re grateful or not, whether we credit God or claim all the credit for ourselves.
So who is this God of no take-backs, truly? To answer this, we’re going to need to take a road trip, first to ancient Sparta, then Rotterdam, and finally a lovely town on the shores of Lake Zurich. It’s a rare thing to preach about Sparta—which I won’t—except to tell you about a visitor to the Oracle at Delphi. It seems that when asked by some Spartan if they should go to war with Athens, the Oracle said "Called or not called, the god will be there” Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit (a-dairy). I have no idea what happened to the Spartan next.
Meanwhile, eleven hundred years later, a Dutch scholar named Erasmus is busy compiling Greek and Latin proverbs for publication (Collectanea Adagiorum) and includes this quote from Delphi (along with 4,000 others). Jump another 400 years, and a precocious 19 year-old named Carl Jung finds the quote and makes it his own. Decades later, as a pioneer in psychology, he will have the quote carved over his front door, a reminder to all who enter that “called or not called, God is with you.”*
Called or uncalled, God is with you. I actually prefer the alternate translation, “Bidden or unbidden, God is with you.” It takes the quote into the realm of worship, think bidding prayer—any words that express the sentiment “God, hear our prayer.” In other words, whether you acknowledge God or not, call on God or not, return and thank God or not, God is with you. Even if someone says “you know what to say” and you stare at them with a completely blank expression, God is still with you. So write it down, have it tattooed somewhere you can see it, or add it to your formerly called Twitter profile: “Bidden or unbidden, God is with you.” But please, use the Latin, ‘cause Latin makes everything classy.
So back to the no-show nine, or than thankless nine, God is with them. They have been released from sorrow whether they run back or not. And this is the nature of God’s unfathomable grace. You can sit out Thanksgiving, but God will still send sun and rain, secret growth beneath the earth, germination and growth, long summer days given to shorter, cooler ones, maturation and harvest, skilled hands at mill and kiln. You can neglect to thank God and still eat, but the experience will not be the same. Bidden or unbidden, God is with you.
Better, in the spirit of gratefulness, to show some appreciation. Grace received, new life given, hope restored—and we can give thanks. Meister Eckhart said “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is ‘thank you,’ it will be enough.” Gratitude transforms us, makes us into new people, restores us to the realm of grace where we can simply receive.
And so, in the spirit of thankfulness and gratitude, I reflect on my new life here, and give thanks for a world without winter, where I never have to apply any of the twenty or so words we have for snow. I give thanks for Floridians, far friendlier than the people back home, willing to strike up a conversation anywhere and at any time (of course, I will deny I said this to any Canadian I meet). I give thanks for the frogs and lizards that surround my home, and the menagerie of birds overhead. And I give thanks for this church, the welcome I have received, and the Spirit in this place.
So, to you I say Happy Thanksgiving, or whatever combination of gratefulness and giving thanks you can make, knowing always that God is with you. Amen.
*http://www.jungnewyork.com/photo_vocatus.shtml
posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 9:18 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home